I spent my last night in London with friends, ordering pints until the moment the pubs closed. They got cabs home and I said I was going to take the tube but I didn’t feel like ending the evening just yet. It was only midnight — basically still happy hour for a New Yorker — and I had hours left in me. So I decided that I would walk until the next tube stop then get the train from there. I walked along Regent’s Canal and before I could cross the bridge to the sleek new buildings of Coal Drops Yard, a boy my age said hello. I was drunk and I am American so obviously I said hello back.
He was lanky with the sort of floppy hair that I’ve always been a sucker for, so we started walking together along the canal. He told me that he was out for a night stroll and we talked about movies but he couldn’t remember the names of his favorite ones. As he spoke, there was a strange lilt to his voice. The pauses between his thoughts felt exceptionally long. His eyes never quite settled on one spot.
“If you can’t tell, I’m on drugs right now. That’s why my brain isn’t working,” he said.
“Yeah, I figured. What are you on?”
“It doesn’t have a name.”
“C’mon, it has to have a name,” I tried.
“My friend made it. He’s gonna try to sell it and I’m testing it out.”
“Is it fun?”
The corners of his mouth turned in a closed-lip smile while the rest of his face stayed smooth, detached from the moment. I asked how he was feeling and he just kept smiling. I asked him the effects.
“Amnesia and euphoria,” he replied, face still smooth.
“Oh?”
“You ever seen that movie Eternal Sunshine…?”
“Of the Spotless Mind. Yeah, of course.”
“Well…this is kinda like that.”
“So you wanted to forget?”
“I guess,” he shrugged and laughed.
“What did you want to forget?”
“You know, I can’t remember.” He laughed harder.
And sure, I know it’s grim, but after walking along the canal with that drugged-out stranger, I started imagining a future: a nightlife scene where entire clubs of people would spend their nights forgetting. (I mean, we’re practically already there. You ever fallen into a k-hole?) Then I was thinking about the appeal of checking out of your mind — thinking that I was long overdue for some nice, thorough dissociation — until a friend told me that she was at a magazine party downtown a few weeks ago and someone we went to college with was there and he took too much ket and the whole thing turned messy. His skin went blue and the ambulance got called and then shiny, trendy people were crying with fear outside a boutique on Mott Street.
Even with proof of its impact, I don’t want to ask the appeal of forcing forgetfulness. I get it. I’ve gotten it. We all know that it’s an attempt to sidestep pain. But forgetfulness is like any other painkiller in that its work depends entirely on its context (on how/if we choose it).
Earlier this year, I took a job as a companion for an elderly couple who lived on the Upper East Side. Twice a week, I’d go to their building, say hello to the doormen, sniff the fresh flowers in the marble lobby and take the elevator up to their floor. The couple, who I’ll call B and A, suffered from dementia and Parkinson’s, respectively. I was there to take B out for lunch, walk around the block with her and basically just keep her company. My job was to build a relationship with a woman who never remembered the last time she saw me.
When I would talk about the job with friends, one of them would always consider the couple’s ailments like options on a survey and ask, “Which would you rather lose: your memory or control of your body?” If the question was posed to a group, everybody tended to choose memory. In some lights, that future didn’t even look so bad. You wouldn’t have to remember the embarrassing thing you did that morning or even the fact that you were losing your memory. My friends saw less suffering in forgetting. I couldn’t ever quite bring myself to tell them about the fear of coming to with a 28-year-old girl you don’t know on some city block you don’t recognize.
It’s not just our own lives and memories that we risk forgetting. Environmentalists and psychologists use the phrase “shifting baseline syndrome” to describe the mass effect of forgetting a landscape’s past. We understand land based on what we see — or perhaps, at best, what we know to have happened there. But as the land around us changes to host new warehouses, roads and apartment buildings, “our newly shaped and ruined landscapes become the new reality,”1 and most of us never know where there used to be wildflowers, where extinct species used to graze.
To put it another way: shifting baseline syndrome is the next generation of New Yorkers never knowing that Mimi’s Pizza used to sit on the block of Lexington between 85th and 86th. And they’ll never know that Paul McCartney used to get their pizza delivered to his jet at JFK and when I was new to the city, I used to get two of their white slices then walk over to the Met where I’d sit on the steps and eat and laugh at pigeons and tourists. And shifting baseline syndrome is why I simply can’t fathom a time when the Lower East Side was dangerous and cheap. It’s the fact that Brooklyn used to be farmland and Manhattan’s Marble Hill was an actual hill of marble and everywhere down by the seaport is, quite literally, built on a floating pile of garbage. It’s not even real land.
But this is the way of cities, I figured. We all know that the only constant in New York is change. And then I went to visit my parents and went for a run around the suburban neighborhood where I grew up and as I ran, I remembered the ticks in the land: where I used to play hockey with neighbors, where I fell off my bike and skinned my knee. I headed for the woods behind the development, the refuge for kids who wanted to smoke pot, kids who wanted to make out and kids like me who wanted to (at least temporarily) disappear. As I ran towards the woods, I noticed a hole where the sky poured through. When I got closer, I saw that all the trees were gone. In their place were bulldozers and pastel bunting.
I crawled beneath a plastic barrier at the edge of where the woods used to be and began exploring the construction site as a heavy weight filled my chest. They had cut down the trees and pummeled out a road that ran over the small brook. They had built an earthen bridge, drilled holes into it and ran wires and pipes labeled “electric” and “gas.” I crawled down a hill and my throat closed. And listen, I don’t believe that the woods behind the suburban development where I grew up were ecological wonders per se but…damn, they paved (kid-)paradise and put up more fucking cookie cutter houses. This land wasn’t supposed to change. Silly me, I had believed that my childhood was safe from the noise of progress.
In the telling of history, you have either the power to forget or the curse to be forgotten. Typically, we understand this collective memory in terms of cultures and people (see: The Decolonialization of Public Memory). But in an essay for e-flux, author/philosopher Donna Haraway brings this problem to all of humanity. She sees our understanding of human history (“the Anthropocene”) as wholly inaccurate. “Species Man does not make history,” Harraway writes. “Man plus Tool does not make history. That is the story of History human exceptionalists tell.”
In her essay, Harraway calls us to forgo human history in favor of a history of “geostories” and “Gaia stories,” something that acknowledges the “webbed, braided, and tentacular” sort of living that is being alive on this planet. She wants a history that includes the changes in rocks and water and animals and plants. She calls for a complication of our story.
Efforts of decolonization can align with Harraway here. Decolonization attempts to reclaim history not through erasure but complication. It asks us to remember that there are many, many more stories than the predominant one. And it asserts that none of them should be forgotten. The only way we can heal our memory is to open to the possibility of its inaccuracies and inconsequence.
And let me tell you: I walked with that stranger in London for about two hours. I wish I could remember more of what we talked about. So much of the conversation has been washed with time. But I do remember that after about an hour of speaking, awareness began resettling in his body. His walk became more self-conscious and he started asking questions like, “Did I tell you that already?” (He hadn’t.) He invited me back to his apartment and I had every intention of going, until we arrived at his front door. With the reality of potentially entering this stranger’s world, I suddenly remembered that I had a flight the next day, that my suitcase was a jumbled mess on my bedroom floor. He stood with me as I waited for my Uber.
“Do you think you’ll remember any of this tomorrow?” I asked him.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I’ll text you.”
The fear of forgetting is tied to grief. Or perhaps vice versa. In moments of grief, we cling to memories, recycle the past in an effort to hold onto it. Remember how short summers used to be? Remember how he stood on his front lawn waving goodbye long after your cab had turned the corner? It is by remembering that we keep the lost thing alive, if only in our heads. There’s that saying that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it but it’s equally true that those who remember are doomed to fight against forgetting.
Months later, I am still wondering how that stranger’s version of history goes.
Howdy y’all, nice to see that you’ve made it to the other side of my tirade. Thanks for that. This is a note to let you know that I’m changing up the format of this newsletter. From now on (I think….idk I’m just testing this out….pls don’t hold me to this), free subscribers will receive the (somewhatly-)monthly newsletter that is this style of essay. However, I don’t wanna leave behind the original intentions of this substack soooo I’m gonna start offering a lil something extra to paid subscribers.
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Gan, Elaine. Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene. https://necrocenenecrolandscaping.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/gantsingswansonbubandt_introduction_haunted-landscapes-of-the-anthropocene.pdf